While the public is often aghast at the harm one particularly evil defendant can perpetrate, it ends up smelling trivial compared to what John Yoo had up his sleeve.  Yoo, a minor league Deputy Assistant Attorney General, is the fellow who prepared a memo to the Department of Defense telling them that torture was as American as apple pie.

Marty Liederman at  Balkinization, via the Washington Post, provides access to the 81 page memo,  Part One and  Part Two.  Mind you, it was just declassified, having been subject to our need for secrecy lest the terrorists know what Yoo had in mind for them.  Or to protect the government from the sheer embarrassment of its content, whichever comes first.

In fairness, not everyone in our government lost their senses:

[T]he March 14th Yoo memorandum, and the April 2, 2003 DOD Working Group Report that incorporated its outrageous arguments about justifications for ignoring statutory limits on interrogation, was secretly briefed to Geoffrey Miller before he was assigned to Iraq, and became the source of all the abuse that occurred there in 2003 and early 2004. (In late 2004, new OLC head Jack Goldsmith reviewed the March 2003 memo, was stunned by what he later called the “unusual lack of care and sobriety in [its] legal analysis” — it “seemed more an exercise of sheer power than reasoned analysis” — and immediately called the Pentagon to implore them not to rely upon it. Later, the next head of OLC, Dan Levin, wrote the Pentagon to confirm that they rescind any policies that had been based on the Yoo memo.

While an 81 page memo is likely more than most people will care to read,  Orin Kerr’s post drew some comments directing attention to footnote 10, “…our Office has recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment has no application no domestic military operations….”  No doubt Orin will be back to offer his analysis of Yoo’s venture into policy-directed revisionism.

Also, a great analysis by David Tarrell at In the Moment, which compares it to the Downing Street Memo and sheds light on its impact on Specialist Sabrina Harman, who took the photographs of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib prison, through her letters home.

And how was John Yoo rewarded for the harm this one person caused so many, and a nation, in his quest to appease his “client” and become an important player in the United States Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel?  John Yoo is  now a lawprof at the University of California, Berkeley, (a/k/a Boalt Hall) as well as Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  From his faculty bio:

Professor Yoo has published articles about foreign affairs, international law and constitutional law in a number of the nation’s leading law journals. He is the author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terrorism (Grove/Atlantic 2006).

Some dangerous people go to prison.  Others go to Boalt Hall and write books about it. 

Update:   Orin opines that he’s struck by how “lawyerly” it is.  Emily Bazelon responds, “lawyerly can mean trussing up bad and thin arguments with questionable analogies from other cases and a horde of citations.”  Jack Balkin chimes in,

This observation points to an important fact about legal discourse: Lawyers can make really bad legal arguments that argue for very unjust things in perfectly legal-sounding language. I hope nobody is surprised by this fact. It is very commonplace.

They don’t really disagree about it, but still manage to find something to argue about.